Three months after making the wildly overblown claim that a second nuclear emergency at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant would require the evacuation of the North American West Coast, environmentalist David Suzuki said he “regrets” the comments.

Nevertheless, the Nature of Things host did not seem to go so far as to renege the claim, which has baffled nuclear scientists.

“I regret having said it, although my sense of potential widespread disaster remains and the need for an urgent international response to dealing with the spent rods at Fukushima remains,” wrote Mr. Suzuki in an email to The Province, which was compiling a feature on myths surrounding the 2011 Japanese tsunami.

He also said that it was “an off-the-cuff response.”

The comment first arose when Mr. Suzuki was speaking at an October 30 event on public water policy at the University of Alberta. At one point, Mr. Suzuki began discussing the tsunami-damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, in particular the spent fuel rods housed at the plant’s explosion-damaged Reactor Number 4.

“I have seen a paper saying that if, in fact, the fourth plant goes in an earthquake … it’s ‘bye-bye Japan’ and everybody on the West Coast of North America should evacuate,” Mr. Suzuki is seen to say in a video of the event captured by Alberta artist Aaron Paquette.

“If that isn’t terrifying then I don’t know what is,” he added.

In Canada and the United States alone, there are roughly 50 million people living in relatively close proximity to the Pacific Ocean. By definition, any wholesale evacuation of North American West Coast settlements would rank among the largest mass-movements of humans in history.

And presumably, if there was a need to empty settlements that are more than 8,000 kilometers away from the Fukushima plant, this hypothethical evacuation order would also seem to apply to Eastern Russia, Northern Australia and most of South Asia.

In short, a significant chunk of the world’s humanity would need to suddenly begin a retreat from the radioactive plume.

Luckily, Mr. Suzuki’s near-apocalyptic claim does not appear to have much scientific bearing.

For starters, the “paper” Mr. Suzuki mentions is the 2013 World Nuclear Industry Status Report.

The paper makes no mention of any emptying of the North American coastline, but the 140-page document does mention evacuation in a brief passage citing the “worst case scenario” that would unfold in the event of the collapse of Unit 4.

Drawn up in the midst of the initial Fukishima disaster by the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, the scenario calls for the “evacuation of over 10 million residents in the wider Tokyo megalopolis within a 250-km radius of Fukushima Daiichi.”
No mention is made of any evacuation taking place outside Japanese borders.

Mass evacuations are indeed a consequence of any worst-case scenario nuclear disaster, and Chernobyl-level nuclear catastrophes at select U.S. plants could indeed empty out cities as large as Chicago or New York.

Nevertheless, no legitimate model of such a disaster has ever projected damage on the hemispheric scale illustrated by Mr. Suzuki.

A week after Mr. Suzuki’s bone chilling comments, VICE magazine attempted a fact-check of his claims by calling up a trio of nuclear experts.

“I’m sorry, but that is ridiculous,” David Measday, a professor emeritus of nuclear physics at the University of British Columbia, told the magazine in regards to the evacuation claims.

He added, “it’s totally impossible! I can’t believe he would say that. When he’s in his own field, he’s usually reasonable. But this is just crazy.”

Mycle Schneider, the lead author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report — and a notable critic of nuclear energy—had a similar reaction.

“I’m really, really shocked about the way it’s being discussed in Canada. It’s just totally insane,” he was quoted as saying in Monday’s Province feature.